Research Interests: American literature, particularly before 1900, with special interests in cultural studies, transnationalism, gender studies, historicist scholarship, biography, popular culture, the American Renaissance.

Specialization: Literary History, Criticism, and Theory

David S. Reynolds, who joined the Graduate Center in 2006, is the author or editor of sixteen books, most recently Lincoln's Selected Writings (2014) and Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (2012). Others are Walt Whitman’s America; John Brown, Abolitionist; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; and Beneath the American Renaissance. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been interviewed some eighty times on radio and TV, on shows including NPR’s Fresh Air, Weekend Edition, and The Diane Rehm Show, ABC’s The John Batchelor Show, and C-SPAN’s After Words, Brian Lamb’s Book Notes, and Book TV. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and is included in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Who’s Who in the World.

Reynolds was born in Providence, Rhode Island. For much of his childhood he lived in West Barrington, Rhode Island, in a home attached to the Nayatt Point Lighthouse (built in 1828). He received a B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to the Graduate Center, he taught American literature and American studies at Northwestern University, Barnard College, New York University, Rutgers University, Baruch College, and the Sorbonne–Paris III.